Chapter 1: Introduction
1.1. Language – a fundamental dimension of our existence
1.2. The lost paradise of the original linguistic unity. The Babel myth and
subsequent nostalgia
1.3. Language as sound and meaning. The linguistic sign. Ferdinand de
Saussure and Louis Hjelmslev
1.4. Language in the process of communication
1.5. Language and writing
1.3. Language as sound and meaning. The linguistic signs sound and
1.3. Langua
meaning. The linguistic sign
If people have been long intuitively aware of the twofold nature of language, (in
other words of the fact that when we communicate through language we actually use
sounds to convey meanings), it was the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure who first
gave a coherent and scientific interpretation of language as a system of signs. In
Saussure’s theory, linguistic signs have a dual structure, the two sides of the sign being
inextricably linked (the metaphor the Swiss linguist uses is that of a sheet of paper the
two sides of which are practically inseparable). For Saussure, any linguistic sign is made
up of a signifiant (English: signifier), that is an “acoustic image” (the phonological
“skeleton“ of the word) and a signifié (English: signified), or a concept, to which the
respective acoustic image sends.1 We should not mistake, however, Saussures’s “ image
acoustique “ for the real sounds we produce when we utter a word. The Swiss linguist
himself
warns
against
possible
misinterpretations
of
his
theory.
In spite of being more «concrete» than the concept, the acoustic
image is primarily a psychologic and not a material reality, which
is proved, he argues, by the fact that we can speak to ourselves without actually
articulating the words whose acoustic image is only present in our mind.2
Two are the essential features of the linguistic sign in Saussure’s opinion: its
arbitrariness and the linearity of the signifier. The “arbitrariness” of the linguistic sign has
been one of the most famous and heatedly debated of Saussure’s concepts. What he
actually understands by the arbitrariness of the sign is the arbitrariness of the relation
holding between its constituent parts, the signifier and the signified. This link is arbitrary
in the sense that there is no reason whatsoever for which a particular string of sounds
should be associated with a certain meaning. On the other hand, Saussure cautiously
warns against any misunderstanding of his terminology. The association between the
acoustic image and the concept is arbitrary in the sense that it lacks motivation; it is not
1
“Le signe linguistique unit non une chose et un nom, mais un concept et une image acoustique.“
(Saussure: 1965 : 98)
2
“(L’image acoustique) n’est pas le son matériel, chose purement physique, mais l’empreinte
psychique de ce son, la représentation que nous en donne le témoignage de nos sens.“ (Saussure: 1965 :98)
arbitrary, however, in the sense that it depends on the free choice of the speakers. In
reality, he argues, we have the very opposite situation: once this association established,
it becomes immutable, that is it cannot be changed. Languages tend to be very
conservative systems and it is not up to any of the speakers in a linguistic community,
and, indeed, not even to the entire collectivity itself, to change the association between
the signifiers and the signifieds in the language they use. For any linguistic community
language is something inherited, functioning on the basis of laws which the users of the
language cannot modify. This doesn’t mean, of course, that languages are fossilized
systems, given once and for all. The changes they undergo, however, take place over long
periods of time and it is only a historical perspective that enables us to identify and
analyze these changes. Even so, no linguistic change can be given a “birth certificate”
where the exact time of its coming into being and those who “fathered” it are mentioned.3
As far as the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign is concerned, two are, according to
the Swiss linguist, the situations in which we can talk about some sort of match between
the acoustic image and the concept it is associated with: the onomatopoeias and the
exclamations. Within the first category, Saussure distinguishes between words that
contain suggestive sounds (“des sonorités suggestives”) which can very well be the
haphazard result of phonetic changes, and “genuine” onomatopoeias, in the case of which
we can also speak only about an approximate and partly conventiional imitation of the
sounds in nature. As for what he calls exclamations (interjections), their variation, if we
compare different languages, proves that we cannot actually talk about motivation. And
even if we admit that the two categories mentioned above represent special situations,
their limited number and marginal position in the language will not allow them to be
considered significant exceptions to the general rule.
As pointed out above, Saussure’s postulation of the notion of arbitrariness sparked
a great deal of controversy. The relation between the sounds that make up the word and
the meaning that word has was not, of course, a subject that the Swiss linguist analyzed
for the first time. As early as in Plato’s dialogue Cratylos, Socrates asks if the names we
use for things are selected so that they correspond to the nature of the things they refer to
or if this selection is entirely arbitrary. While Cratylos supports the first point of view,
Hermogenes, Socrates’ other interlocutor favours the second one. The philosopher
doesn’t explicitly opt for any of the alternatives, offering instead a number of more or
less doubtful etymologies. The notion of arbitrariness as lack of motivation postulated by
Saussure was subsequently refined by linguists. It was argued that there is some sort of
motivation in the use of any lexical item. What we should talk about is rather that this
motivation can have different degrees of obviousness. A difference was established
between absolute or external motivation, lying in the very nature of the acoustic image
that somehow suggests the meaning of the word, a case illustrated by onomatopoeic
words and interjections (Saussure’s objection that there are differences between various
3
“À n’importe quelle époque et si haut que nous remontions, la langue apparaît toujours comme
un héritage de l’époque precedente. L’acte par lequel, à un moment donné, les mots seraient distribués aux
choses, par lequel un contrat serait passé entre les concepts et les images acoustiques – cet acte, nous
pouvons le concevoir, mais il n’a jamais été constaté. “ (Saussure: 1965 :98)
languages – in order to express pain, for instance, a Romanian will say “au” while an
Englishman will say rather “ouch”, the word that is used to imitate a dog’s barking is
“ham” in Romanian, “woof” in English and “oua” in French – was dismissed as
irrelevant) and relative or internal motivation where the meaning of the word can be
analyzed starting from its structure in which case we can talk about morphological,
semantic or phonetic motivation.The morphological structure of derived and compound
words can thus offer a clue to their meaning.4 Since we know, for instance the meaning of
both the word home and the suffix –less we will be able to analyze the meaning of
homeless. Compounds will be a more difficult case since some of them are, indeed,
semantically transparent – everybody will be able to understand that a taxi driver is
someone who drives a taxi, and a hothouse is some sort of construction where a high
temperature is preserved inside – other compounds are opaque, since obviously a hot dog
is not a dog that is hot and a red herring is not a red fish. Even in such cases it can be
argued that an etymological analysis of the word can lead to a successful interpretation of
the word as it will uncover the semantic changes the word underwent. Thus a word that
was formed on the basis of a metaphor becomes a fossilized expression and the initial
motivation is lost. Phonetic changes also alter the structure of words and again initial
motivation is lost. It is difficult for an Englishman who is ignorant of the etymology of
the word to link the modern English word rely to the Latin religare and to see that it is
related to rally too. The motivation is also lost if some words are not inherited or are lost
in the history of a language. Any Romanian will understand the word oier (shepherd) as
referring to someone taking care of oi (sheep, plural), while its synonym păcurar will not
be easily related to the Latin word pecora (sheep) as this word was not inherited in
Romanian. An interesting but somehow opposite case, will be that of the so-called “folk
etymologies” which represent attempts of a linguistic community to assign some sort of
motivation to an otherwise opaque form by modifying the phonetic structure of the word
and making it similar to other words in the language. Thus the French word écrevisse
became cray fish in English. An interesting case is the ungrammatical form tran(s)versa
instead of traversa (cross), a word of French origin (traverser) in Romanian. The word is
mispronounced by analogy with other Latinate words in Romanian where the prefix trans
(across) appears. However, in this way the real origin of the word is uncovered, since it
was initially formed from trans and versus.
The second essential feature that defines the sign and that is discussed by
Saussure is the linearity of the signifier. By this, the Swiss linguists understands that both
in articulatoy terms and in auditory ones the signifier is characterized by duration. This
duration is unidimensional and is conventionally represented as a line including the
successive moments in time. It takes time to utter a word and it takes time to perceive and
understand it. The producing and the analysis of the signifier are processes that unfold in
time, that are made up of successive stages. On the contrary, the signified is something of
4
It should be noticed, however, that such analyses account for the way in which the word was
formed (derived or compounded), but the ultimate components of the word – free morphemes or affixes
– still remain unmotivated in the Saussurian sense.
which we have an instantaneous perception. We can compare this to our perception of
visual signs which is simultaneous and multidimensional. This is more obvious, Saussure
argues, if we think of the written aspect of languages. Any writing convention is, indeed,
based on the principle of linearity.
Ferdinand de Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale (published a couple of
years after his death, in 1915) by several of his students, marked a turning point in the
history of modern linguistics and his theory of the linguistic sign (though much refined
by other linguists) remained a cornerstone for all subsequent theories of reference. It is
particularly relevant for understanding the importance and role of phonetics among other
linguistic disciplines. As we shall see later, since phonetics is concerned with the study of
sounds, its domain is clearly that of the signifiant.
Another linguist’s contribution to the understanding of the linguistic sign is
particularly relevant for our discussion: the Danish linguist Louis Hjelmslev, the most
outstanding representative of the glossematic school. Hjelmslev, too, describes the
linguistic sign as a binary reality. He distinguishes between the levels of expression and
content, corresponding roughly to Saussure’s signifier and signified, respectively.
Another essential dichotomy Hjelmslev uses, starting from his illustrious predecessor, is
that between substance and form. The linguistic sign, he argues, is not just the relation
between a signifier and a signified, but the relation between expression form and content
form. The terminology used can be misleading and it is necessary to point out that form is
understood, in this view, as the way in which a language structures the continuum
represented by what Hjelmslev calls sense at both the expression and content level. Each
form thus established is necessarily associated with substance.5
We can illustrate Hjelmslev’s theory by concrete examples pertaining to what he
calls the level of expression and the level of content respectively. Both English and
Romanian, for instance, have front vowels. The fact that English has four front vowel
phonemes and that Romanian has only two is a result of the different ways in which the
two language-systems structure the same expression continuum (sense, in Hjelmslev’s
terminology). Each form (phoneme in our case) is necessarily associated with a certain
phonetic substance. All human beings have the same anatomical features, but while an
5
Criticizing Saussure’s theory that stresses the importance of form as an ideal reality, organizing
a preexistent substance (“cette combinaison” – i. e. between the signifier and the signified – produit une
forme, non une substance”, Saussure, Cours, p. 157), Hjelmslev refines it, by pointing out that we can
speak not only about a necessary solidarity between expression and content, but, at each level, about an
equally necessary solidarity between form and substance. By segmenting the continuum of sense at each
level – expression and content, respectively – a language creates forms necessarily associated with
substance and by that very fact form and substance depend on each other: “La fonction sémiotique est en
elle-même une solidarité: expression at contenu sont solidaires et se présupposent l’un l’autre. Une
expression n’est expression que parce qu’elle est l’expression d’un contenu, et un contenu n’est contenu
que parce qu’il est contenu d’une expression… Si nous conservons la terminologie de Saussure, il nous faut
alors bien voir – et c’est ainsi qu’il faut comprendre son point de vue – que la substance dépend
exclusivement de la forme et qu’on ne peut en aucun cas lui prêter d’existence indépendante…Le sens
devient chaque fois la substance d’une forme nouvelle et n’a d’autre existence possible que d’être la
substance d’une forme quelconque. Nous reconnaissons donc dans le procès du contenu une forme
spécifique, la forme du contenu, qui est indépendante du sens avec lequel elle se trouve dans un rapport
arbitraire et qu’elle transforme en substance du contenu.” (Hjelmslev, 1968: 72-76)
Englishman will tell you that he has ten toes and ten fingers a Romanian will speak about
his twenty degete. Again, a different segmenting operates, this time at the conceptual
level (the level of content), in the two language-systems, respectively.6 The idea that in
any system represented by a language we deal with different segmentations of an
amorphous continuum at both the level of expression and at that of form is essential in
Hjelmslev’s theory.7 Any significant unit or any form at both the level of expression and
the level of content is thus defined by the contrast in which it stands with all the other
units in the system. Saussure had already used the term différence when describing this
fundamental property of all languages.8
6
Hjelmslev’s classical example is that of the colour spectrum. Comparing French to Cymric,
Hjelmslev points out that the two languages operate different segmentations. Thus vert in French is either
gwyrdd or glas in Cymric, bleu correspnds to glas, gris to either glas or llwyd and brun to llwyd. There is
no overlapping between the forms recognized by the two languages respectively:
vert
vert
bleu
gris
gris
brun
gwyrdd
glas
llwyd
(Hjelmslev, 1968: 77)
7
Ceci nous montre que les deux fonctifs qui contractent la fonction sémiotique: l’expression el le
contenu entrent dans le même rapport avec elle. C’est seulement en vertu de la fonction sémiotique qu’ils
existent et qu’on peut les désigner avec précision comme la forme du contenu et la forme de l’expression.
De même, c’est en vertu de la forme du contenu et de la forme de l’expression seulement qu’existent la
substance du contenu et la substance de l’expression qui apparaissent quand on projette la forme sur le
sens, comme un filet tendu projette son ombre sur une surface ininterrompue. (1968:81)
8
“Tout ce qui précède revient à dire que dans la langue il n’y a que des différences… Un système
linguistique est une série de différences de sons combinées avec une série de différences d’idées.”
(1965:166)